S,T, COLERIDGE'S IMAGE OF THE GROWTH OF THE MIND AS RELATED TO ART AND EXEMPLIFIED IN HIS POETRY A Thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts at the University of New South Wales, 'July, 1976, by Kate Gadman. I declare that this thesis has not been submitted for a degree or similar award to any other University or Institution. Signed: A SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT As a young poet Coleridge was attracted by the logic and shape of David Hartley's associationist psychology but he grew to suspect that individuality is the precondition rather than the product of development. Eventually he combined conceivable structure with enigmatic potential in the image of the growing vegetable organism. When this image is applied descriptively to abstract psycholo­ gical movement, the seed symbolizes an antecedent principle whose self­ development incorporates free-will and self-consciousness in a process of progressive metamorphosis. The mentality and learning method of the child exemplify this conception. Coleridge envisages a hierarchy in which the highest activities of mind, 'will', 'reason' and 'imagination', constitute 'nodes', or transitional experiences in the upward expansion of growth. Coleridge relates a theory of art to the structure of thought. The artefact grows out of conscious and unconscious assimilative processes, emerging in symbols of both contextual and numinous significance. Thus the value of the work is not only in its autonomous entity but is also a quality of the organic experience by which it is apprehended. Coleridge's own early poetry moves towards 'organic' art, where the work absorbs and recreates the processes of mental growth by which it is produced. 'Frost at Midnight' and The Ancient Mariner most notably employ special techniques of structure and symbolism to effect the reader's participation in psychological experiences. i A NOTE ON TEXTS The following list contains the texts of Coleridge's works consulted. Abbreviations are given for those editions from which quotations have been taken. AP Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. London: William Heinemann, 1895. AR Aids to Reflection and The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: to which are added His Essays on Faith and the Book of Common Prayer, etc. Bohn's Standard Library edition. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1884. Aids to Reflection. Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge. 6th edition. London: William Pickering, 1848. Allsop Letters, conversations and recollections of S.T. Coleridge. Edited by Thomas Allsop. 2nd edition. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1858. BL Biographia Literaria. Edited with his aesthetical essays by J. Shawcross. 2 vols. Revised edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. [1st pub. 1907] Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of my literary life and opinions. Edited with an introduction by George Watson. Everyman's Library edition. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1956. CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Earl L. Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-1971. Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Roberta F. Brinkeley with an introduction by Louis I. Bredvold. London: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by Thomas M. Raysor. Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft Press, 1969. [1st pub. 1936] ii Friend The Friend. Edited by Barbara E. Rooke. 2 vols. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969. IS Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. New York: Pantheon Books, 1951. [Entries cited by page] JDC The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited with a biographical introduction by James Dykes Campbell. London: Macmillan and Company, 1905. [1st pub. 1893] rr JJJJ Coleridge on Logic and Learning: with selections from the unpublished manuscripts. Edited by Alice D. Snyder. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929. LPR Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion. Edited by Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. The Complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971. LS Lay Sermons. Edited by R.J. White. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 19 71. Miscellanies Miscellanies Aesthetic and Literary: to which is added The Theory of Life. Collected and arranged by T. Ashe, B.A. Bohn's Standard Library edition. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1885. Notebooks The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. 3 vols. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957 - [Entries cited by number] PW The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge including poems and versions of poems now published for iii the tirst time. Edited with textual and bibliographical notes by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. [1st pub. 1912] SC Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism. Edited by T.M. Raysor. 2 vols. Revised Everyman' s Library edition. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1965. [1st pub. 1930] TL "Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life." In Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge. Edited with an introduction by Donald A. Stauffer. Modern Library edition. New York: Random House, 1951. TM S.T. Coleridge's Treatise on Method as published in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. Edited with an introduction, manuscript fragments and notes for a complete collation with the essays on method in The Friend, by Alice D. Snyder. London: Constable and Company, 1934. TT The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: with additional Table Talk from Allsop's "Recollections", and manuscript matter not before printed. Arranged and edited by T. Ashe, B.A. Bohn's Standard Library edition. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1888. [Entries cited by date] The friend: a series of essays to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and religion, with literary amusements interspersed. 3rd edition with the author's last corrections and an appendix, and with a synoptical table of the contents of the work, by Henry Nelson Coleridge. London: William Pickering, 1837. The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Hitherto Unpublished. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Pilot Press, 1949. iv CONTENTS Page A Summary of the Argument i A Note on Texts ii CHAPTER I Introduction 1 CHAPTER II From Clockwork Necessity to Freedom and Metamorphosis 12 CHAPTER III Mind as Organism 34 CHAPTER IV Nodes of Growth: Will, Reason, Imagination 63 CHAPTER V The Mind and Art 94 CHAPTER VI The Poetry of Growth 128 CHAPTER VII Organic Poetry: A Summary 182 SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY 191 V CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In 1967 Basil Willey made the comment that there must seem to be little excuse for writing a book on Coleridge when to do so means simply to cover areas which have already been well discussed, using material which has been long available to eve:r:yone. 1 The same is obviously true of my discussion here, and I can only follow Basil Willey' s own argument and 'excuse it on personal grounds' • So much has been written on Coleridge in recent years2 with, as Willey points out, so much to come from the study of newly published works, that further reworking of familiar material may seem superfluous. Never- theless, the 'excuse' which so readily demands a voice, carries with it its own justification. Coleridge is not only a man for all time but he is also a man for all men; his writings are at once personal and universal and, as such, they have an enormous amount to offer the individual who may find, in his turn, that he has something personal and perhaps relevant to say about what he has learned. My own reasons for working on Coleridge have become clearer as the work has proceeded and amount simply to the fact that I have learned more about 'thought' and about 'how to think' as a result of thinking about Coleridge, than from the whole of my previous education. And Basil Willey' s comments would suggest that my experience is not completely idiosyncratic, that perhaps the constantly recurring desire to write about Coleridge 'on pe.rsonal grounds' promises a continuous process of learning and re- learning which is distinctly profitable to an understanding of human nature. 1 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1972), p.ix. 2 I am thinking in.particular of works such as J.A. Appleyard, Coleridge's Philosophy of Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), OWen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (London, 1972) and Thomas McFarland, Coleridge ~he Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969), all of which analyse the major pre­ mises of Coleridge's thought in considerably more detail and with much greater philosophical acumen and learning than I could do here. 1 In the following discussion I have tried to give a brief exegesis of what has been widely agreed to be a fundamental aspect of Coleridge's total philosophy, the development, or 'growth', of mind. My aim has been to bring together in simple form the central concepts of Coleridge's psychology to show their relation to each other as parts to a whole, the whole being the growing organism, the mind. An interesting example of the primacy which Coleridge accorded to the study of psychology on morphological principles is found in a note he made on Dr. Gillman's copy of The Statesman's Manual in which he suggests that his own works exemplify 'the gradual Evolution of the Mind of the World, contemplated as a single mind in the different suc­ cessive stages of its development'. 3 The growth of the individual mind in 'successive stages' is characteristic of Coleridge's theory and its being seen by extension to reflect 'the gradual Evolution of the Mind of the World' suggests that his conclusions are not without some theo­ retical framework.